Read Online Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster - Free Book Online Page A

American woman to be “a buster,” he notes that the ship has “smoking rooms for Ladies and Gents, intended I fancy, to keep the women out of the men’s smoking room which they infest in the German and French steamers” [italics mine]. He concludes by calling Olga Mead, the Hungarian wife of architect William Mead, “a B—” [Bitch]. All in all, this reveals more misogyny than can be ascribed to the garden-variety male chauvinism of the period.
    Earlier in this rather revealing letter, Millet begins his commentary on the other passengers with a few lines that have always intrigued Titanic researchers:
Queer lot of people on this ship. Looking over the [paasenger] list, I only find three or four people I know but there are good many of “our people” I think.…
     
    Although “queer” was already a pejorative term for homosexuality by 1912, Millet was most likely not using it in that context. But who are the “our people” he so enigmatically sets off in inverted commas? If he simply means “our kind of people,” why did he not say so? And from his condescending references to the American passengers, it seems clear that Millet thinks most of those on board are not his kind of people, nor would they be for a refined Englishman like Alfred Parsons.
    Parsons was a key member of the “little Bohemia” that had first formed around the Millet household in Broadway during the summer of 1885. In 1900 Millet had sold to Parsons five acres of his Russell House property, on which he built his own house and garden. First known as an illustrator and painter of English pastoral scenes, Parsons later gained a reputation as a garden designer. He assisted Lawrence Johnston in the creation of Hidcote, today one of England’s most-visited gardens, and designed the grounds for Henry James’s Lamb House in Rye. Like James, Parsons never married and was considered to be a “confirmed bachelor.”
    Could Millet therefore mean “our people” to be gay people? Parsons was a very close friend of Millet’s, and it is not impossible that he could be alluding to their shared affinities. It would be decades before anything like a gay identity would emerge in England or America, but from the writings of E. M. Forster, Edward Carpenter, Hugh Walpole, and others, we know that Edwardian gay men did manage to find one another. Can it be merely coincidence that a good number of the artists and writers drawn to Millet’s Broadway Bohemian “colony”—Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Alfred Parsons, Edwin Austin Abbey, and Edmund Gosse—are believed to have had same-sex affections?
    If indeed Millet noted other gay men among the travelers on the Titanic , who might they have been? One passenger often thought to be gay was a good-looking, thirty-five-year-old rubber merchant from Liverpool named Joseph Fynney. He was active in youth work at his local church, and the late-night visits of adolescent boys to his home raised the suspicions of neighbors that he was “a Nancy boy.” Fynney visited his widowed mother in Montreal yearly and usually brought along a teenaged boy for the trip. This time his companion was a dark-haired, sixteen-year-old barrel maker’s apprentice named Alfred Gaskell. Both Fynney and Gaskell, however, were traveling in second class and so would not likely have been seen by Millet during the brief time he had been on the ship.
    During the long wait on the tender, however, Frank Millet would probably have noticed a handsome Egyptian manservant who was traveling with Henry and Myra Harper (and their Pekingese). Millet may have been acquainted with Henry Harper, since he was a good friend of his more dynamic cousin, Harry Harper, and had done work for the family’s magazines in New York City. Henry Sleeper Harper would later write that the Egyptian manservant was “an old dragoman [guide] of mine who had come with me from Alexandria because he wanted ‘to see the country all the crazy Americans came